While visiting a Wild Bird Rehab Centre in South Africa, I learnt a most astonishing lesson.The now nearly extinct Falcon, while being bred there in captivity, displays very interesting and unusual behaviour for a raptor.
When a little baby Falcon (“eyasses”) is hatched the very first living species its eyes focus on, it will instantly adopt and become in its own mind!
It immediately identifies and assumes as its very own the nature, that of this particular species.
In other words, if the very first thing it sees is a human being, it will fixate upon and consider itself to be a human. It will completely disregard its own genesis of origin as a bird of prey and emotionally and mentally bond with, and even begin to imitate human behaviour patterns. It ignorantly denies and overrides its own original nature and becomes instantly a double product of captivity, not only as one born into captivity but also the victim of a mind imprisoned and held in bondage for a lifetime by the illusion of a false perception.
It appears that there is a parallel between this phenomena and the way many Christians manifest the same pattern in their spiritual life. The seeds of the destruction of their spiritual potential are often sown at its very inception.
Christians absorb and internalize very early in life a picture produced by the religious environment and spiritual ecology within which first open their eyes. Received either by tradition, heritage or subsequent spiritual experience this internalized construct immediately and unconsciously cements the picture of what a Christian is expected to be and sets the limitations end expectations in place for the future.
Not unlike the misguided baby Falcon, the Christian now begins to emulate a superficial and false man made external religious cultural identity. He lives mesmerized and in ignorance and denial of his/her divinely ordained design function as one who has been given the power to believe and live a son of God.
Hence, as people representing different denominations i.e.: Pentecostals, Methodists, Baptists, Charismatic’s, Word of Faith, Catholics, etc., we act out, and strive to excel in imitating this internalized construct of the religious system which first represented Christianity to us, with its peculiarities and unique trappings!
Most Christians live from the cradle to the grave without awakening from the trap of this hypnotic condition.
They never discover the truly liberating nature of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the revelation of the Divine Mystery of the unique union between humanity and Divinity it proclaims. They live with little or no awareness or experience of the true character of their own spiritual nature as being partakers of His Divine Nature.
Saul of Tarsus, a man divinely destined to become Paul the Apostle, to whom the mystery of God in Christ with its deeper and fuller implications for mankind was first revealed, was once himself besieged and driven by the perceived demands of a severe and uncompromising external religious system.When Paul encountered the Resurrected and Glorified Christ on the road to Damascus, his first vision and attachment was not to a religious system or body of doctrine, but the presence and power of His Divine Personage in human form.
This crucial vision and decisive and dramatic internalization of the first impression of the resurrected heavenly Christ Jesus as the Head of His earthly Divine Body at once became the uncompromising foundation and intrinsic essence of Paul’s Christian life, experience and teachings.
The divine revelation of the super-natural impartation of a new internal spiritual reality, namely, Christ in us, the Hope of Glory! , transformed Paul, and henceforth became his outward expression of life.
This new revelation given to Paul by the Cosmic Christ Himself is the very antithesis of all other failed external religious systems required to be internalized by human striving and self-effort.
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